The SIARD Format implies the following limitations:

• The size of a SIARD file cannot be larger than 18’446’744’073’709’551’615 Bytes (ca. 18 ExaBytes) (ZIP64 limitation).
• The number of (table and lob) files cannot be larger than 4'294'967’295 (ca. 4 billion) (ZIP64 limitation).

These limitiations are probably irrelevant because real databases will not reach such sizes for quite some time.

The SIARD Suite is further limited by this condition:

• All of the meta data of the database must fit into JAVA memory (heap).

This limitation, however, can be reached if the CPU storage is small or the database is very complex. One can circumvent the problem by running SIARD on a machine with enough main storage space (e.g. 4 GB) and manually increase the JAVA heap using the command-line option –Xmx2000m.